Hail Mary

David’s father had been living in an apartment by the freeway for the past six months. According to David’s mother, whose hairdresser’s fiancé’s golf buddy worked in the same office, he was spiraling again. Showing up late, leaving early, losing clients. There were credible rumors he’d been using his company card at a number of strip clubs along I-5, which would have been a red flag for anyone, let alone a recovering alcoholic who had been in the running for Executive Vice President of Sales for the Pacific Northwest. So when David received a text that read Emergency! Meet at Harriman’s Pub ASAP, he assumed the worst.

What’s wrong? David typed, hesitating with his thumb over the send icon. He tried to convince himself that the crisis would resolve itself one way or another. Eventually, inevitably, he caved to the guilt.

Emergency, his father repeated.

Maggie glared across the table. David showed her the texts. She took one look and set her fork down with a sigh. Her parents were still together. They made each other laugh, they went on dates, they slept in the same bed. Which made it difficult for her to appreciate how a missed call from David’s mother could elevate his blood pressure, how a chain email from his father could keep him up all night, or why he couldn’t enjoy the holidays like a normal person.

“What do you think?” David asked.

“I think he needs to be institutionalized.”

“You know what I mean.”

“He’s your father. Don’t look at me.”

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Maggie shrugged impatiently. “Do what you have to do.”

David got up from the table and Albert padded after him, whining, hoping to be taken for a walk. “If I’m not back in an hour, you can assume I’ve left you for a younger woman. And we’re taking Albert with us.”

“He’s all yours. I’m keeping the house and the money.”

“Joke’s on you. We don’t have any money.”

“We can have fake money for a fake divorce.”

“I gave all of our fake money to my real Dad.”

“Then I’m fake suing him, too.”

It was almost unbelievable, the running list of shit he had put them through. They hadn’t been married more than an hour before he’d plucked the microphone from Maggie’s maid of honor and rattled off a bitter, meandering screed. Then there was the motorcycle, the prostitute, the broken hand. And, most recently, the Olympia Ice Resurfacer, which he’d had the audacity to call an idiot-proof investment and which, as far as David knew, was still sitting in a storage unit out by the airfield.

Maggie returned to her salad, disappointed and losing patience. She clicked her fork against her plate and waited for a thought to pass before bringing the vegetables to her mouth.

“I’m sorry I have to leave,” David said, dropping the act. “And that my dad is an idiot.”

“Go fake fuck yourself,” Maggie said, smiling.

David found his dad hunched over a glass of cranberry juice, spinning it on the bar every few seconds with this thumb and middle finger. There was no emergency, no relapse. Of the many drinks of choice he had cycled through, none had ever involved cranberry juice.

“So what’s the emergency?”

“Oh, relax. Just sit, for the love of god. Sit with your old man and have a drink. Stu! This one’s allowed to drink. David here has self-control. Certainly didn’t get it from me. Or from his mother, for that matter.”

Stu asked David what he wanted. He ordered a Sierra Nevada and overtipped, hoping to compensate for whatever inventory of personal grievances his father had subjected him to. Though he self-identified as a member of the Church of Individual Responsibility, he maintained a remarkable capacity for blaming others.

“You know, it’s generally frowned upon to lie about an emergency like that.”

“Would you have showed up if it wasn’t an emergency?”

“It isn’t an emergency.”

“How can I make it up to you? How about some good news?”

Even his good news, David knew, was eventually bad news.

“Like what?”

Craig shrugged, arching his brow and twisting his mouth into a stupid little grin.

“Not quite yet,” he said. “Let’s just sit here for a bit. Enjoy your beer, talk to your old man. Relax. Would it kill you to relax?”

David’s father failed to grasp the zero-sum nature of their relationship. He didn’t seem to understand that whatever debt, financial or otherwise, he couldn’t honor became a line item on David’s balance sheet. Whatever albatross he could no longer bear was conveniently slung around his son’s neck. Even when he showed up in David’s life looking for peace of mind—especially when he showed up in David’s life looking for peace of mind—David found himself scrounging around in his own shallow pockets.

David took a deep breath, chasing it with a swig of beer.

“This is as relaxed as I’m gonna get. Take it or leave it.”

Craig wouldn’t tell David where they were going. Between directions, which he doled out one turn at a time, he smirked and squirmed and rubbed his palms together. He could hardly contain himself. “Oh man,” he kept saying. “Get ready.” He hadn’t even noticed that they were listening to Capitol Public Radio, which, in his mind, was tantamount to the Ministry of Communication. David pulled onto I-80 West, cruising past strip malls and car dealerships and industrial parks. Everything north of the river was depressing. Sprawl, traffic, low property value. Craig instructed his son to exit the freeway and take a left toward Arden Fair. David tried to imagine what kind of good news could possibly be waiting at the mall at 7:45 on a Tuesday evening.

Immediately after stepping out onto the pavement Craig leaned back into the cabin, fumbling with something on the floorboard. David flicked a knot of petrified birdshit from the taillight. Eventually Craig emerged with a fist-sized box in Christmas-themed wrapping paper he’d turned inside out. There was something symbolic about the sleighs and snowmen and pine trees that were faintly visible in the parking lot twilight. Never quite there, never quite not.

“Open it.”

“Dad.”

“Just shut up and open the damn thing.”

It was a watch, European and out of his price range. Craig ordered him to try it on. Several links too large, the watch rested at the base of his knuckles. With his hand raised the thing slid halfway to his elbow, snarling itself in body hair. It was garish and clunky and stupid, and even if someone else had given it to him, he would never wear it.

“Thank you.”

“Plenty more where that came from.”

They walked between parked cars, past the front doors of American Eagle, Forever 21, Banana Republic. Every thirty seconds or so Craig would look over at his son, monitoring his excitement, making sure he was eagerly anticipating whatever fucked-up scenario awaited him.

“It’s getting cold already,” Craig said, jamming his hands into his pockets. It was sixty-five degrees. “Global warming my ass.”

He stopped at one of the storefronts, held the door open, and waved David in with a flourish. It was a Starbucks. They bypassed the line and made their way to the back of the coffee shop, where a man in a baggy golf shirt was working on a bulky, no-nonsense laptop. Craig stepped over the flat rectangular charger and sat down across from him.

“Craig,” the man said, not expecting to see him but not surprised either.

“Brett. This is my son, David.”

“How’s it going,” Brett said. He pulled a card out of his wallet and held it out between two fingers like a cigarette.

“Fine, thanks.”

David stood back a few feet and leaned against the island with the straws and napkins, examining Brett’s card. It said he was a financial manager.

“Alright,” Brett said, typing. “Gimme one second.”

“It’s all online now,” Craig explained over his shoulder. “I just log in and select the games I want to bet on and then Brett here just checks my account.”

Brett nodded.

David’s father had been addicted to alcohol, cocaine, talk radio, and sex with women other than his wife. But the gambling was new. (How had Maggie put it? Always evolving, never changing.) Nothing was simple with him, not even his pathologies. He couldn’t just play the horses at Cal Expo or the craps table at Thunder Valley like your run-of-the-mill degenerate. No, he had to place sports bets against some guy who wore golf shirts and had a name like Brett.

“It was a good week,” Craig continued, a little bit louder than before. “I hit a nice four-game parlay. Hell of a payout.”

Brett cleared his throat.

“Well, almost hit a nice four-game parlay, I think you mean.”

“Brett,” Craig said, his ruddy enthusiasm dwindling. “Please don’t fuck with me. Bills spread, Packers spread, Lions over, Falcons money line.”

Brett turned his laptop. Craig’s eyes bounced around, found what they were looking for, and forgot to blink.

“That’s not right,” he said, pointing. “The Packers-Seahawks score. That’s wrong.”

“Did you watch the game?”

“Of course. 12-7, Green Bay.”

Brett shook his head.

“You didn’t see the last play?”

“Of course I did. Wilson threw a pick in the end zone as time expired. Game over. 12-7, Packers.”

“Look.” Brett opened a few new tabs, pulling up the score on ESPN, NFL, FOX. “It’s all over SportsCenter, the internet, the news. It’s everywhere.” Brett found a video and angled his computer toward Craig, narrating as the play unfolded. “So, fourth and ten with eight seconds on the clock. Wilson drops back, gets pressured, rolls out, and tosses a Hail Mary from the forty as time expires.”

“Yeah, I know. I watched it happen.”

“Seven players go up for the ball in the back of the end zone. Jennings picks it off.”

“Exactly. Touchback. Game over.”

“But Tate gets his hands in there late and they call it a touchdown for Seattle.”

They watched the play again in slow motion. Craig squinted, trying to track the ball as it disappeared into a swarm of arms, pads, and helmets. Two referees stood over the pile of bodies, one signaling touchdown, the other waving his hands overhead.

“How did you not see this?” Brett asked. “They reviewed it forever. The commentators were ruthless.”

“I was watching on mute. Gruden annoys me. Turned the game off once I saw the interception.” Craig’s voice was hollow, distant. “There’s no way that’s a touchdown.”

“They missed an OPI as well. These are replacement refs, remember. Because of the lockout. Anyway, as you can imagine, people are losing their shit.”

“So, that means…” David said.

Brett held his breath for a moment, trying to piece together a few words of sympathy.

“Sorry, Craig. That’s a bad beat. Honestly maybe the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Craig hung his head and flipped through his wallet, looking for money they all knew he didn’t have. He ran his hands through his hair, which was longer and thinner than David had ever seen it. At the first sign of hair loss, back when David was in elementary school, Craig had sheared himself down to the scalp. What’s the point, he’d said. It’s all gonna go eventually. He’d kept it that way for the last fifteen years, never letting it grow out past a half an inch. Now it was long enough to tear out if he wanted to.

“Replacement refs botched the call on a Hail Mary,” he said to himself. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Brutal,” Brett said. “Might be the toughest loss I’ve ever seen.”

A blender erupted in the background. David jumped, knocking an empty cup onto the floor.

“Can I get you tomorrow?” Craig asked. “I’m a little short, obviously, because I was expecting to be up.”

“I’ll be here for another hour,” Brett said.

“He told you he doesn’t have it,” David said, surprising everyone, himself included.

“And I’m telling you it’s in your dad’s best interest to come up with it by nine o’clock.”

“Not a problem,” Craig said. “I’m good for it. You know I’m good for it.”

“You shouldn’t even be collecting on this,” David said.

“You think this is the first time he’s shown up empty handed?”

“It was a horseshit call. You said it yourself.”

Brett laughed under his breath.

“What do you do for a living, David?”

“I teach high school.”

“That’s very noble of you. So when your students bomb a test or an essay or whatever, do you just hand out passing grades?”

“More than you could possibly imagine.”

“Maybe that’s why the American education system is in the shape it’s in.”

“And maybe people like you are the reason—”

“That’s enough,” Craig said through his teeth. He took a moment to gather himself before addressing Brett. “Like I said, I’m good for it.”

There was an ATM at the other end of the mall. Craig apologized the whole way there, sighing and watching his feet. A group of middle-aged women in tight dresses spilled out of a sushi restaurant, ankles wobbling on high heels. One of them shouted something unintelligible. The others laughed and clapped and cheered.

“Reminds me of your mother,” Craig said.

“Is gambling even allowed in AA?” David asked.

“Probably not. I don’t know. I don’t go anymore. Too much god stuff. Too many losers.”

He stood in front of the ATM for a few seconds before using it, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, taking a few deep breaths. It looked like he was preparing for a fistfight he didn’t expect to win. Finally, he fed his card into the machine, entered his PIN, and attempted his withdrawal. Insufficient funds. He threw his wallet on the ground and wrapped his hands around the edges of the ATM, doing his best to shake the stout red column that was almost certainly recording the incident. He smashed his finger into the touch screen. He returned to the main menu. He tried his savings instead.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mumbled.

Craig ejected his card, blew on the magnetic strip, and rubbed it against his pant leg. He was desperate. Maybe, with a little luck and a little friction, a spare hundred bucks would materialize in his checking account. Maybe a god neither of them believed in would show them mercy neither of them deserved. But the machine reached the same foregone conclusion.

Not only did David enjoy how utterly defeated his father appeared in that moment, he felt justified in his cruelty. He had earned the right to take perverse pleasure in Craig’s perpetual collapse.

“How much do you need?” David asked.

“No way,” Craig said, shaking his head. “I won’t take your money.”

“Return the watch, then.”

“Store’s closed. I bought it on credit, anyway.”

“So what, you’re just gonna let Brett send his goons after you? Is that how it works?”

“Something like that.”

“Well then you’re out of options. Tell me how much.”

He counted a small stack of bills, muttering to himself in increments of twenty, stopping at one hundred and forty. “I’m short eight sixty. Payout was ten-to-one. Would have been ten large if those refs hadn’t fucked me. I would have been back in the black.”

“What’s the real number?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how deep in the hole are you. Total.”

“None of your fucking business.”

David stepped up to the ATM as his father continued to grumble about the referees.

“What do they need a union for, anyway? They blow whistles once a week. Can’t be that difficult. They’re not fucking coal miners.”

“Clearly it is difficult, or I wouldn’t be out here on a Tuesday night draining my savings to bail you out.”

“But if the real refs had been there, if they hadn’t been allergic to earning a living…”

David could sense himself getting sucked into an unwinnable argument. He could feel the maddening gravitational pull of his father’s circular reasoning. It wasn’t even that David himself was a dues-paying member of the CTA, which he decided not to mention at that particular moment. It was the preposterous, frictionless ease with which any and every personal grievance—with gambling debts, with emissions laws, with a cold Egg McMuffin—could be enlisted to serve his paranoid, contradictory, resentment-fueled worldview.

“You just would have found another way to lose,” David said.

“Wanna know what I just realized?” Craig asked on the freeway. “Trying to gamble your way out of debt is a lot like driving drunk.”

“They’re both signs of addiction,” David said, trying to crush whatever nugget of loser wisdom his dad planned to impart. “They both involve doubling down on bad decisions. They both demonstrate utter disregard for—”

“Yes, yes, guilty as charged. But I’m talking about something deeper than all that.”

They passed the In-N-Out on Madison, its neon and palm trees presiding over the drive-thru dinner rush.

“The thing is,” Craig continued, “you know you shouldn’t be doing it. You just can’t convince yourself not to. And up until the moment something goes wrong, you’re fucking untouchable. I swear to god. Back when I was drinking, the best part of my day was driving home. Getting into the car, turning the ignition, putting her into gear, and driving through the night. I’m not talking about driving after a few drinks, checking your mirrors the whole way home, keeping the speedometer right at forty-five. I’m talking shithouse drunk. Can’t-read-the-fucking-speedometer drunk. Let me tell you—I know this sounds terrible, but I’m just being honest here—there’s no better feeling. You’re invincible, and yet somehow, in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about dying the whole time. Complete and total annihilation. Sometimes I wished for it, actually.”

“So did we,” David said.

It wasn’t true, at least not in a literal sense. But it felt good to say. It felt like something his father needed to hear. Craig cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, pulling himself up by the handle above the window.

“Alright. I guess I deserve that.”

He opened his mouth to elaborate but couldn’t find the words. For once in his life, he had nothing to say. David pulled into Harriman’s and parked next to his father’s car. NPR was still droning in the background. David cut the volume as a woman with an English accent starting talking about Benghazi.

“I don’t want to see you until you can pay it all back,” he said.

“Of course. Absolutely.”

“And I don’t want to see you again after that.”

After fumbling with his seatbelt, Craig stepped out of the car and stood at the door, nodding to the pavement, trying to think of something memorable to say. He made a noise David had never heard before. Then, after he pulled himself together, he said that he was sorry and that David deserved a better father. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. Whenever something went wrong and he felt like shit he’d try to apologize for everything all at once. Maybe he meant it this time. He sounded different—more wounded, maybe. But if David took back what he’d said, if he displayed even a whiff of contrition, he knew his father would just take something else from him.

David slid the watch off and held it out over the center console. Craig didn’t bother arguing. He got back into his car and drove away under the sickly glow of the streetlights.

Harriman’s was busier than it had been earlier, but David managed to find a seat at the bar. Stu brought him a beer and he watched the Giants game on a TV with some sort of calibration issue. San Francisco’s ivory uniforms had a green tinge to them, but David got used to it. By the end of the third, the Giants had already used four pitchers. At this rate, the commentators joked, the Giants might break the record for most pitchers used in a single game. The record, they said after a commercial break, currently stood at eleven.

David checked his phone, an ember of guilt flickering in his chest. Four missed calls. Maggie had nearly killed David when she’d found out about the ice resurfacer. She had stated in no uncertain terms that any further loans, payments, investments, or schemes involving his father were grounds for divorce. Even if he called her now, told her everything over the phone, they would still fight about it later. He could already see her, burying her face in her hands, whispering his name into her palms like a broken mantra. Did bookies have the same sorts of conversations with their wives? Did Brett ever have to beg for forgiveness when some deadbeat cleaned him out? David slipped Brett’s business card out of his pocket and ran his thumb across the raised ink.

“Hello?” Brett seemed friendlier on the phone.

“Hi, it’s David. Craig’s son. We met a little bit ago.”

“Look, I know you care about your father, and that was a real motherfucker of a loss, but a bet’s a bet. There’s nothing—”

“I’d like to place a wager.”

The line went silent for a few seconds.

“Okay.”

“What kind of things can I bet on? How specific?”

“You have no idea.”

“I want to bet that the Giants use their entire bullpen tonight. Twelve pitchers.”

“Give me a second.”

David could hear him clacking away on his shitty laptop.

“Alright, here’s the deal. Usually I don’t take live bets. But considering the circumstances, you giving me new business after your pops took one on the chin, I’m feeling generous.”

“Ten to one.”

“Those are extraordinary odds.”

“These are extraordinary circumstances.”

“That’s not how this works, kid.”

“Goodbye, then.”

“Alright, alright. Calm Down. Ten to one. How much?”

“One thousand.”

“Your funeral.”

“We’ll see.”

“You good for it, David?”

“I teach at Cordova High School. You can come break my arm in front of Algebra 2.”

“We usually start with fingers.”

“Who needs all ten.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Lucky for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Lucky for you.”

“Alright. I’m putting you down for a grand at plus one thousand.” And then, with a smile David could hear over the phone, “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”

It was a slow game, even for baseball. San Francisco rolled out a new pitcher every inning and Stu produced new beers on a similar schedule. By the bottom of the ninth, they had only used nine pitchers. Down two runs with two on and two out, the Giants had a better chance of winning the game than he did of winning his bet. Then a crack rang out through the TV’s busted speakers. Belt had sent one deep to right, where it caromed off of the manual scoreboard and rolled between Arizona’s center and right fielders. Two runs crossed the plate before Belt was gunned down at third.

Extra innings.

David asked Stu for another beer and Stu gave him a look.

The steady pace of substitutions continued. With the game still tied six-six in the top of the twelfth, Bochy waddled out to the mound in his windbreaker, took the ball from the rattled sidearm pitcher who had just walked two batters in a row, patted him on the back, and waited for a scrawny Japanese lefty to jog across the infield and take the mound. A banner appeared on the bottom of the screen, announcing the new and obscure Major League record.

Maggie was asleep when he got home. So was Albert, curled up in the crook of her legs. David took a rapturous piss and undressed as quietly as possible, wrapping a hand around his belt buckle so it wouldn’t jangle as he stepped out of his jeans. The covers were cold on his side of the bed. Maggie had wrapped her arm around his pillow, forcing him to settle for one of the itchy decorative ones that always ended up on the floor.

“You smell good,” she muttered in her sleep. David kissed her on the forehead and hoped she’d be pleased enough with the money to forgive him for how he’d earned it. A few minutes later she jerked her leg, waking Albert, who lifted his head to survey the room.

David pulled what little comforter he could out from under the dog, who groaned lazily. Once his head hit the throw pillow it all came roaring back. The twelve pitchers and the Hail Mary and the Olympia Ice Resurfacer. His father and his mother and all of the other women. Maggie and their marriage and the kids they’d talked about having. All of it whirled together inside his skull, gaining momentum, threatening to disturb the stomach full of beer Stu should have stopped serving him around the seventh inning stretch. He swung his left foot off the side of the bed—a trick he’d learned in college. Eventually the spinning slowed and the world dissolved and in that moment, half asleep, David thought about how much he’d enjoyed the drive home.